🚀 Quick Start

Run it

docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 ruseler/alpine-php-webserver

Open http://localhost:8080/. You'll see phpinfo() from the bundled index.php. The static probe at http://localhost:8080/test.html is also served.

Stop with Ctrl+C.

Serve your own code

Bind-mount a local directory into /var/www/html:

docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 \
  -v "$PWD/php:/var/www/html" \
  ruseler/alpine-php-webserver

Nginx serves static files directly and hands *.php requests to PHP-FPM via the Unix socket at /run/php-fpm.sock.

The container runs as nobody (UID 65534)

Bind-mounted files must be readable by that user. For write access (sessions, caches, uploads), make the directory writable too:

sudo chown -R 65534:65534 ./php

Named Docker volumes get the right ownership automatically.

With Docker Compose

Save as docker-compose.yml next to your code:

services:
  web:
    image: ruseler/alpine-php-webserver
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    volumes:
      - ./php:/var/www/html

Run it:

docker compose up -d
docker compose logs -f web

See Docker Compose for more realistic stacks (MariaDB, Redis, reverse proxy).

What port does it listen on?

8080 inside the container. The image intentionally does not bind privileged ports because it runs as nobody. Map whatever public port you want:

docker run --rm -p 80:8080 ruseler/alpine-php-webserver   # host 80 → container 8080

Tweaking limits on the fly

The most common knobs are exposed as environment variables:

docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 \
  -e client_max_body_size=64M \
  -e upload_max_filesize=64M \
  -e post_max_size=64M \
  -e memory_limit=256M \
  -e date_timezone=Europe/Madrid \
  -v "$PWD/php:/var/www/html" \
  ruseler/alpine-php-webserver

See Environment Variables for the full reference.

Next steps

• Put it behind a reverse proxy for TLS and real client IPs.
• Build your own image on top with Composer & Building.
• Add custom Nginx routing with Nginx Configuration.
• Enable OPcache for production — see PHP Configuration.

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This documentation is a fork of erseco/alpine-php-webserver. The upstream documentation is available here.